I am sitting in the former
Senate chamber of the former Louisiana State Capitol building, awaiting the
next step of jury duty to begin. The Old State Capitol is a recently restored
Gothic castle on the lower Mississippi, once famously maligned in print by Mark
Twain who called for its destruction due to sheer hubris. Fires and typical
Louisiana boondoggles and the natural degradation of grand and beautiful things
in hot climates nearly honored our National Satirist's wish, but a proud
restoration plaque bearing the name Bobby Jindal, a whip-smart young Governor of
Indian descent, former exorcist and plausible Republican challenger to Obama in
2012, welcomes me to its vault of polished wood and stained glass, conscious
that the spectre of arch populist Huey Long is watching, though he might bear
Sean Penn's drowsy grimace, where I sit and wait to do my civic duty.

This a perfect setting in which
to peck out a review of Johann Johannsson's Fordlandia,
an elegant suite of lush string music straddling the austere and the populist.
It swoons and swells like it is quietly bolstering for something spectacular to
occur, much like my fellow citizens jockeying for aisle seats in this gracious
hall, more a chapel than a reasonable place of business.

The back-story behind Fordlandia fits this complicated venue.
Henry Ford sought to undermine the rubber cartels of Asia, so he carved out a
rubber plantation in the jungles of Brazil. Countless things led to its
spectacular failure: the eschewing of botanists in favor of engineers in the
planning, staggering setup costs, and the development of synthetic rubber
during the Second World War. None of these proved to be more lethal to the
project than was Ford's own need to solve a problem philosophically, and
Nature's reliable resistance to philosophy.

As I type this, Johannsson's slow
organ and winds and strings endlessly unfold and refold like the flag atop this
building, limply signifying America in the weak breeze. The setting, the music
and the congregated duty-pressed strangers has me sat in the closest thing to
church in decades.

Ford built Fordlandia as a
perfect slice of apple pie out in the jungle: white picket fences, strict
Prohibition, 9-to-5 ethical dignity. They had Sousa marches and square dancing
in the evenings. The imported engineers braved malaria for this endeavor gladly
- you can swallow any man's ideology when a fat pension is at the other end -
but the locals revolted. They, like any reasonable people, preferred to toil in
the less taxing crepuscular hours, and to drink away the evenings. Johannsson's
sad orchestra soars over Ford's doomed utopia like a reconnaissance glider,
bearing witness to another inevitable replaying of man's folly. The jury
coordinator has arrived, offering up the conditions by which we can opt of the proceedings
through a tinny microphone. I just heard the first of many "I don't pay
taxes for this" that will be voiced throughout the week.

Incompatible with Ford's scripted
Americana, the native workers set up an island of bars and brothels upstream,
luring the transplanted Industrialists to discreet Third World charms. The rubber
trees proved to be just as unwilling to play the game, wilting in tight rows of
shoddy soil. Unbeknown to Ford's planners, natives need prostitutes and rubber
trees need to grow scattered throughout the jungle. I recognize someone in line
trying to get out of jury duty because a nephew being named for him is due to
be born this morning. His success in this is as likely as Ford's was in Brazil.
Johannsson's strings are being undercut by a crying baby brought against its
will into this event, while the jury coordinator cheerfully bounces it on her
hip.

Never underestimate the resilience
of a good plan; my friend waves his release form at me as he darts off to the
hospital. The woman in front of me bookmarks her copy of The Audacity of Hope as the instructional film started. The glare
from the church-like windows renders the film nearly invisible from my seat. We
are told about lunch breaks, our $12/day compensation and the general judicial
process. Pens are passed out, and we are informed by the video judge that we
should use these pens to aid our recollection of the facts presented during the
trial. "The trial is being held in search of the truth," explains the
narrator.

The truth I seek is generally
a looser one than that of the process in which I am engaged, but then the
stakes are more real here. Johannsson's velveteen sadness gives the mundane
process of paperwork a marked gravity. His string techniques resemble the stretched
jangle of his fellow Icelanders Sigur Ros and the protracted melancholy found
in the similar work by Estonian composer Arvo Part; layers of unabashed
emotional gauze overlap until the hues become deep as blood, boundless as a
dramatic cloud- choked sky. I can imagine a defendant either being set free or
hauled off to jail to this music. I can see Ford's hired thugs beating the
workers into submission as clapboard houses, Main Street in exile, burn to the barren
ground. The higher goal of narrative art is to hover at the optimum height, one
where you can see the action on the surface as well as the way the landscape
becomes the horizon. In this process, this music, this place, these things
converge.

We are released to wait at
the library across the courtyard. As with most situations in Louisiana, the
servants running the show are adorable and sweet and the served are mealy and
atrocious. One introduces herself as "Miss Bobbie" and says that
there is a homeless woman that frequents the library that likes to dismiss
jurors, so if we don't hear it from Miss Bobbie, we are to stay put.

I love Miss Bobbie and her
cheery dedication. The ring on her iPhone is a church hymn. I love that
homeless woman, and hope she appears to disrupt the wheels of justice. I love
those drunken, whoring natives in Brazil and even old Henry Ford, a little. In
mechanizing one's philosophy and greed, the two required ingredients of true
hubris, the richness of humanity still rumbles through, wrecking one thing
while setting another right. And most of all, I love the way art can soar above
it all, the way a stained glass castle will eventually outlive the protests of
our greatest cranks, the way history cycles churns through wars and lives and
all people great and small, ground everything up to convey just a little
context for anyone who might be listening, the way some simple sustained tones
working in concert can embody the whole of the world. It is for these things I
patiently wait for my opportunity to serve.

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